The Coat Check

The Aurelia Ballroom looks like the inside of a jewelry box, and it's your job to make sure nobody notices you built it.

Twelve chandeliers like frozen waterfalls. Forty round tables in copper linen for the Ironhawks and black for the Oakland Redtails, because the sponsors want both teams in one room and the league wants the room to look friendly. A string quartet playing pop songs slowly. Four hundred and twelve guests, sixty-one dietary restrictions, two ice sculptures of the Crown Bowl trophy already sweating under the lights.

You check your earpiece. You check the run sheet. You check, for the ninth time, that the head table cards are right.

Covington, J. Table one. Seat four.

"Breathe, Ava," Emeka says beside you, low. He's in a dark suit tonight, the earpiece coiled behind his ear, scanning the doors. "You've done a hundred of these."

"A hundred and six."

"See? You're overqualified." His mouth tips up. "After this week, I'm taking you to dinner. I'm not asking this time. I'm warning you."

You laugh, because Emeka is easy to laugh with, and because if you don't laugh you'll do something stupid like look at the doors.

At 7:40 the doors open and the room tips toward them like a ship.

He's in a black tux that fits like it was cut on him, which it probably was. No tie, collar open. The cameras go off like popcorn. And on his arm, in sheer gold that pours down her body like honey, is Soleil Delmonico.

You know her face. Everyone knows her face. Three seasons of the funniest sitcom on television, a mouth made for close-ups, honey-blond waves, green eyes that look a little bored by being the most beautiful woman in every room. The gossip sites have had her and Jalen together for four months. Jude asked you once if she was nice. You said you didn't know.

She leans into Jalen's shoulder for the photographers. He smiles the commercial smile, dimple and all.

His eyes go over her head and find you by the service door in your black dress and earpiece. They stay there one second too long.

Then he looks away.

"Huh," says Emeka. "Ava, is there something I should know about table one?"

"Don't."

"Didn't say anything."

Dinner goes the way dinners go when you've planned them right: invisibly. Salads out, salads in. The Redtails' left tackle wants a second steak and gets it. A sponsor's wife cries in the bathroom and you find her tissues and a quiet corner.

At 9:05 the emcee calls Jalen up for the toast.

He doesn't use notes. He never did. He stands at the microphone with a glass of sparkling water and talks about his mama driving a school bus in Mobile, about his teammates, about how the best things in his life came from people who believed in him before anyone had a reason to. The room is silent. Even the Redtails are listening.

"Somebody told me once," he says, "that you don't get to pick when the big moments come. You just get to decide who you are when they do."

He looks up.

Across four hundred people, under twelve chandeliers, his eyes find you again at the back wall.

You said that. You said it to him on the pier in Fairhope the night before his last college game, your feet in his lap, the bay black and silver. You'd forgotten you said it. He hadn't.

The room applauds. You go out through the service door before your face can do anything.

The coat check is a narrow room off the foyer, racks of furs and wool and garment bags, a little half door with a counter. Your coat-check attendant is on break. You step in to straighten a rack that doesn't need straightening, and to breathe somewhere no one can see you.

"Lovely evening."

You turn. Stanton Dryden is leaning on the counter, a glass of bourbon in his hand, silver hair perfect, his tan the color of money. Up close he's still handsome in that polished way, like a car commercial. Up close his eyes are the same as they were six years ago in your kitchen in Mobile. A calculator behind a smile.

"Guests aren't allowed back here, Mr. Dryden."

"I'm not a guest, sweetheart. I'm a friend of the family." He sips. "You got my note."

"I got your note."

"Good. I was worried. You looked very…" He waves the glass at you. "Moved, during his little speech."

"What do you want?"

"Want? Nothing. I'm protecting an investment. Same as I did six years ago." He leans in. His cologne is cedar and something sweet. "Clause four, Ms. Easterly. No contact. No disclosure. You breach it, I sue you for every cent plus damages, and a judge will be very interested in where a twenty-two-year-old waitress got a quarter of a million dollars." His voice drops to something almost kind. "Think about the boy's college fund. Think how it would look, empty."

Your hands go cold.

"Stay away from my family."

"I'm trying to keep you away from mine." He straightens his cuff. "Smile, sweetheart. You're working."

He walks out into the foyer and the light, and you see past his shoulder, across the crowded doorway, all the way to the ballroom entrance.

Jalen is standing there with Soleil Delmonico's hand still on his arm.

He's not looking at her. He's not looking at the sponsor talking at him. He's looking at Dryden walking away from the coat check, and then at you inside it, and his face is something you've never seen on it, not on the field, not in the pocket with three men coming at him.

It's very, very still.

You get home at 11:50. The house is dark. Mena left a plate in the oven with foil over it and a note: EAT, Ava. Jude made you a drawing. It's on the fridge. It's a football. Or a potato.

It's a football. Number seven on it, in brown crayon.

You sit at the kitchen table in the dark with your shoes off and your earpiece still in your bag and the drawing in front of you. You don't eat. The refrigerator hums.

At 12:04 your phone lights up on the table.

Unknown number. A Charlotte area code.

You know before you open it. Of course you know. Your heart knows, the stupid thing, the way it knew his footsteps on the stairs of your old apartment before he knocked.

It's Jalen. Got your number off the team liaison sheet. That's on me.

The dots appear. Disappear. Appear.

I'm not asking anything tonight. Just tell me you were okay. All this time. Were you?

You look at the drawing on the table. At the brown number seven. At the hallway, where a door is open a crack.

You can seat four hundred people in an hour. You sit in the dark with your thumb over the keyboard and have no idea what to say.